Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

simonw

Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years. This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to where they are. Related: the classic line commonly attributed to original IBM CEO Thomas John Watson Sr: “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” https://blog.4psa.com/quote-day-thomas-john-watson-sr-ibm/

colinbartlett

A single engineer should not get fired for an architectural decision that clearly had buy in from many people.

lozenge

Spotify was another big proponent of DynamoDB, does anybody know how that went?

sailfast

Submarine article. Outside of that, it sounds like the system worked perfectly. They launched, they paid DB costs (the 8M was not a ledger mistake) and then they rebuilt after they wanted more cost savings. Also a bunch of folks got promoted. The 8M came from VCs lighting money on fire. Honestly this seems like the system worked as planned to me, not a case study in how not to do things.

fontain

Everything is a good idea until it isn’t. The entire industry was enamoured with microservices for far too long. We can look at these mistakes in hindsight and learn from them but we can’t judge them without the context of the time. Software was very different even just 10 years ago. $8m is a rounding error.

Esophagus4

Hate to say it but kind of a lousy article... zippy writing but lots of Monday Morning Quarterbacking for something the author doesn't seem to show much knowledge of. Maybe this is his style to gin up subscribers, but I'm not a fan. > But nobody was optimizing for cost. They were optimizing for their next promotion. Each rewrite was a new proposal, a new design doc, a new system to put on a resume. The incentive was never to pick the boring, correct choice — it was to pick the complex, impressive one. ...I guess it could be possible nobody thought about cost at all, and this was all misaligned incentives and resume-driven development, but I find that kind of hard to believe? As someone who has made cost mistakes in the cloud, this claim seems a bit silly. Not to detract from his experience, but I didn't actually see much payments experience at all on his resume, so I'm curious why he's branding himself as a payments guru. Kind of tech content creation fluff, I guess.

websap

> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe. People forget how quickly Uber scaled, and the user impact of not being able to track your trips could be catastrophic to retention. There's a class of tech-influencer who think they can dissect past decisions on a blog post without being in the room when the technical constraints were being laid out. This is Monday morning quaterbacking at it's most grotesque.

skizm

In general is there any practical way to fix the issue of "Every rewrite was someone's promotion project"? There doesn't seem to be any incentive for employees to care about projects long term. Keeping something running smoothly is never rewarded the same as launching something new or fixing something broken.

taspeotis

This is an ad

AbrahamParangi

the author overestimates how much ~$5M/yr actually is. a business like uber isn't happy about that but it's not even in the top 10 of things they're wasting money on. moreover this isn't the engineer's sole fault it is more the fault of whoever actually approved the expense.

Aurornis

> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe. > Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This This person is not a good resource. Uber was a very fast growing company, both in terms of their product and staff. Turnover in architecture happens. Calling this a catastrophe and click baiting about firing engineers over a rounding error in Uber’s overall finances is gross. I understand this person is trying to grow their Substack with these inflammatory claims but I hope HN readers aren’t falling for it. This person’s takes are bad and they’re doing it to try to get you to become a subscriber. This is hindsight engineering from someone who wasn’t there.

refulgentis

This is horrible slop, and I gave it a long chance. Gave up after handwringing about how DynamoDB would be $300 a day for Uber. Should have gave up when it framed each DB evolution as a “promo project”

Aboutplants

Imagine firing everyone that made a mistake, and not keeping the people that learned a valuable lesson?

junon

> Every rewrite was someone’s promotion project. At least when I worked at Uber, that wasn't really how it worked. The eng org was so big that it was nearly impossible to track all the projects people worked on, and you'd get micro-ecosystems of tools because of it. Some grew large, others stayed quite "local".

paulbjensen

What's an $8m mistake to a company like Uber? They made $9.8bn in profits in 2024.

gadders

$8m is a lot of money for us working stiffs, but it's about 0.03% of their 2025 profits. Hindsight is 20/20. Not saying they did the right thing, but they may have had specific performance reasons for originally going with DynamoDB.

dasil003

This seems like dramatically overstating the mistake. Yeah it was expensive, and yes this could easily been foreseen, but that’s really small potatoes compared to mistakes I’ve seen. I mean I’ve seen promos off shit that never even fully worked beyond pilot scale and had to be rolled back because it was fundamentally flawed on purely technical level.

tajd

> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe I mean, given how quickly things can change I think the language and sentiment here isn't quite right, it's just how businesses can change and we can't necessarily control that.

kayodelycaon

Who exactly is supposed to be fired for this? If you don’t have price controls, it’s easy to run up a bill. If no single person had the responsibility to check the cost, then no one actually failed at their assigned job. So you either fix the system or fire everyone involved in the decision. What you’re doing now is looking a scapegoat to beat up. You’re angry and you’re going to make someone pay for pissing you off.

kshacker

Can I do a mea culpa? This is more than 3 decades back. I was a junior programmer (2-3 years in industry) sent to a client site in europe. You can imagine the state of systems those days. I wrote (or rather updated) a fix which would updated the discount and tax rates on orders based on new terms. It would run every day to account for ... whatever. You pick the values from master file, update all the orders and move on. I wiped out VAT on all orders and for the next month the paper invoices were sent without VAT. So the invoice is $100, VAT is $20, the invoice should be $120, but they were sent as $100. 100s of invoices every day would be my guess. Nobody noticed. For a month. Millions of dollars of revenue and IIRC millions of dollars of VAT. Until a customer complained to the CEO. We had a firefight to fix it, not just technical but legal and managerial. We can send a new invoice just for tax. We can redo the invoice. We can send a debit memo. What is the right decision? But what if customers does not pay? What about returns? How will we track returns? Of course we were doing the technical solutions and the client company was front-ending how to handle it business wise. And the managerial firefight - who did it, what are the safeguards in future? We had a company exec visit the client site to manage the issue. I was in the hot seat but I was protected by my managers from any fallout. Just do the work. Do not screw up again. (Test every row every column even if you did not change it) A month later the sales director at the client company got fired. The grapevine is that this was just the tipping point, but you never know. BTW these were paper invoices printed onsite and mailed out, but I do not know if someone had the job to scrutinize them. PS: True story, going by old memory, although such legends remain fresh in your mind, forever. Not sure it belongs here, but the mention of firing for a multi-million dollar mistake pulled this into cache memory.